Pariah

by Thomas Emson

  “The ladder’s out,” said Tash.

  “Jump, then,” said Faultless. “You’re nearly there.”

  “Nearly where?”

  He said, “Leap, Tash.”

  “She ain’t leaping into the dark like that,” said Hanbury.

  “She’s here somewhere,” said Tash. “I . . . I can see him . . . his eyes, his face—he’s here.”

  “Jump,” said Faultless.

  “No,” said Hanbury.

  Faultless leapt off the ladder. He plunged, sweeping past Hanbury, past Tash. He fell and was thinking, Please let there be—

  He hit the ground and rolled into what felt like branches. They cracked and crunched as he flailed around in them.

  “It’s okay,” he said. Before he could get up and check out his surroundings, Tash landed on him. Then Hanbury fell in a heap to the side.

  “You okay?” he said to Tash. He was holding her. Everything was calm for a second. Everything was right. She nodded. He was looking into her sapphire eyes. They glittered, even in the gloom. He nearly kissed her.

  “Jesus Christ, save us,” said Hanbury.

  “W . . . what?” said Faultless, the moment between him and Tash gone. He got up, scrabbling through the stuff that covered the ground.

  Branches, he thought. Trees. White—

  Tash gasped.

  “They’re bones,” said Hanbury.

  The elevator screeched. Faultless looked up. He held his breath, thinking they were going to get crushed. But it stopped about ten feet above them, sparks flying. And the light they made lit up the room. The few seconds of illumination showed Faultless what Hanbury had seen.

  Bones. Human bones.

  Hanbury said, “It’s a fucking charnel house.”

  Chapter 83

  KING, NOT PRINCE

  Jack salivated. He was shaking, and his teeth were chattering.

  “Do it, fucking do it,” he was hissing at Hallam Buck, the useless, cowardly cunt of a human.

  He had waited an eternity for this. During the long ages of his existence, many men had bowed before him. They had cowered and obeyed. He had spoken to the evil in them. He had called them to their duty.

  And they had always come, willingly.

  They licked their lips at the prospect of savagery. They had welcomed the opportunity to be his ripper. To kill seers and gut them for the treasure inside.

  Men had been made with evil in them. Men had been made with him in them. And the malevolence only had to be beckoned out for it to be easily unleashed on others.

  Genocide. War. Murder. Rape. Torture. All the barbarity came from the same place. From the deep, dark pit where malice writhed. The deep, dark pit slotted into every human heart.

  It was a test. It was a game. And he was its player.

  Make them do evil. Call it out of them.

  He had done well. He had stained the world. He had spread

  his poison. But adversaries came. The seers. He shook with hatred for them and their maker.

  Damn the laws of the universe, he thought.

  He deserved his prize. He’d played his role since time began. He’d played it well. He’d done his duty and spread his wickedness.

  He deserved now to be king, not prince. It was time.

  But the fool he had chosen for this task was hesitating.

  Hallam Buck, who reeked of evil, was weak. Hallam Buck, whose heart was contaminated by perversion, was frail when faced with his obligations. Hallam Buck was useless.

  And where was Spencer? Crawled into the darkness somewhere behind the pillars. The coward, thought Jack.

  The teenager and his friend had been the first humans to come near Jack for years. In the years after Troy had buried him, he had tried to call others. The ones who built over the well and bricked it up. The ones who built the estate after the slums were torn down.

  Although a few men had lingered near his tomb when they heard him speak, none had stayed long enough for his voice to awaken the serpent in their hearts.

  Until Spencer.

  The boy was decayed. He was wicked. But he had boundaries. He hated killing.

  The weedy little cunt, thought Jack.

  Hallam raised the knife above the child-seer’s head. He’d pulled up her T-shirt to expose her stomach. And he was staring at her skin.

  Jack bristled. “Stop looking, you fool,” he said. “Kill her first. Cut her throat. It’s quicker. Then eviscerate her.”

  Hallam looked at Jack.

  “She’s . . . she’s beautiful . . . ”

  “Kill her. Do it. Do it, and I’ll make you a prince in my world. You can have as many kids as you want, then. I’ll have them fucking brought to you on trays. Do it.”

  Jack would do it himself. He had the will, just not the right.

  The laws, he thought, damn the laws.

  Written into him as they were written into all creation.

  If humans knew the truth, they would never enter a church again. They would never walk into a mosque or a synagogue.

  A noise alerted him. He turned. Shapes in the distance. He snarled. He narrowed his eyes and saw into the darkness. He exploded with fury. He wheeled back to face Hallam.

  “Kill her, you bastard! Kill her now!”

  Hallam was looking beyond Jack. His eyes widened.

  “Don’t stare,” shouted Jack. “Kill her.”

  “It’s . . . it’s Faultless,” said Hallam. He dropped the knife and backed away.

  Jack saw red. His rage became a volcano. He whirled round to face the trespassers.

  The man appeared. Jack was going tear his legs off. He readied himself. He saw more clearly. The man had a cold, hard face.

  Jack recoiled.

  And then he saw the stranger’s eyes.

  One brown, one blue.

  Jack felt something he’d not felt in centuries.

  Jack felt fear.

  Chapter 84

  AN ANGEL

  While Hanbury and Tash circled round to rescue Jasmine, Faultless would take out the head honcho. That was the plan. They’d hatched it in the few seconds it took to find the doorway out of the charnel house into the cavern, where pillars reached up into the darkness and stretched back as far as it was possible to see.

  Now, as he darted towards the pale man in the cape, Faultless heard Tash screaming for her daughter, Jasmine screaming for her mother. He heard Hanbury threatening to kill anyone he got a hold of. But then all the noise faded, and Faultless was fixed on his adversary’s face.

  The eyes were coal-black. The face was moon-white. The hair long and greasy to the man’s shoulders. His cape flapped and it shimmered in the darkness. And he had a tuft of hair on his chin, just like—

  The man held out his hand, as if trying to stop a runaway train.

  Faultless halted. He was aware of struggles going on in the background. Voices echoed. Curses flew. But he was mostly transfixed by the man in front of him, and they stared at each other for what seemed to be an eternity.

  The pale man pointed at Faultless with a long, yellow fingernail and said, “You are the darkness . . . the darkness in the corner of my eye.”

  “Are you Montague Druitt?” said Faultless.

  “I was once.”

  “Are you Jack the Ripper?”

  The stranger smiled. “I was once.”

  “Who are you now?”

  “I like Jack. You can call me Jack.”

  “Who are you really?”

  “I am the lord who gapes. I am the lantern of the tomb. I am the moth eating at the law.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  The man snarled. “It means who I am. You should know.”

  Faultless shuddered. He should know? The man was staring right at him, direc
tly into his eyes. He furrowed his brow. There was something familiar about the stranger, and that familiarity scared Faultless. It gave him goosebumps. He got the feeling that knowing this man was a bad thing. It was a dangerous thing. And not just for your life but for your soul.

  “You’re like me,” the pale man told him. Behind him, there was struggling as Hanbury laid into Spencer, as Tash fought to free Jasmine. But the stranger paid no attention to what was going on. He seemed fascinated by Faultless.

  “Do you know what you are?” the stranger asked him.

  The question unsettled Faultless, but he threw one right back. “Do you know who you are?”

  “You’ve not faced judgment yet, have you? For a killing.”

  “Neither have you.”

  “More similar than you think, then.”

  “I’m not like you. I don’t know what you are.”

  The stranger grinned. “You don’t know what you are, either.”

  “W . . . what am I?”

  “An angel,” said the pale man.

  “Flattery will get you killed.”

  “You think you can kill me?”

  “If I have to.”

  “You’re not strong enough yet.”

  “What d’you mean yet?”

  The stranger looked over his shoulder and then back at Faultless. “You have fucked it all up for me.”

  “Sorry about that. Couldn’t let you kill her, see.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  “I will fucking stop you.”

  “I’ll have the mother killed if I can’t kill the child.”

  Faultless fumed. He wanted to plough into the man, but something hindered him. Something in the back of his mind holding him on a leash and telling him to wait. The stranger had said Faultless wasn’t strong enough yet to kill him. Although he didn’t understand what he meant, Charlie knew there was truth in the statement.

  Now he said, “You touch her, and I’ll hunt you down till the end of time, fucker.”

  The stranger hesitated. Almost as if he believed that literally.

  A scream erupted. It was laced with fury. Faultless blinked. Tash was hurtling towards the pale man, coming from the gloom like a laser.

  The stranger wheeled to face her. He glanced over his shoulder at Faultless and said, “I’ll have her ripped like I had her sister ripped.” Faultless lunged forward, his fists bunched. Tash kept coming. Then the stranger said, “Like I had your wet nurse ripped.” Faultless charged. Tash clawed. A black shape whipped away to the right, blending into the darkness.

  The stranger was gone.

  Faultless and Tash ran into each other and fell in a heap.

  Chapter 85

  ONE AND THE SAME

  Faultless quickly led everyone back into the elevator shaft filled with bones.

  He was carrying Jasmine. Her wrists and feet bled where Hanbury had wrenched them out of the cuffs in his desperation to free her. The older man was crying. He panted and held roughly on to Spencer. At first, the youth begged for mercy. Then he shut up, as if resigned to whatever pain Roy Hanbury would inflict on him.

  “Are you okay?” Faultless asked Tash.

  She was pale. Her eyes were glazed. She swayed and stuttered as she walked. She looked at him, and he saw dread on her face. He’d never seen anything as terrible. It shook him.

  “Tash?”

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Is my baby—”

  “She’s fine. Fainted, that’s all. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  They looked up. The lift blocked their way. Panic clutched Faultless. He looked back towards the doorway and the dark cavern beyond.

  Was Jack still there?

  He thought about their conversation. They’d circled each other like two stags, neither ready to make a move. It was weird. Faultless would have usually laid into a bloke in that situation. But that was no normal man. He was something extraordinary.

  So why did he hesitate in killing me? Faultless thought.

  The stranger had actually shown fear. Faultless saw it in his eyes. It flashed in the cold, black evil of his gaze.

  Staring into the killers face, Faultless saw something else as well—recognition.

  The stranger seemed to know who Faultless was.

  You’re like me.

  The horror of it made Faultless tremble.

  You’re like me.

  What the hell did that mean?

  Everything was coming apart. His life was not his life.

  He had to find Lew.

  The old man’s face appeared in his mind. He held his breath and grew cold. Slowly, the face melted away, and in its place came another mask. And its dimensions were exactly the same, only the second face was a younger man’s image. Like Lew, he had a tuft of hair on his chin and coal black eyes. He had long hair, dark instead of white.

  Jack, he thought. And Lew?

  His mind began to unravel with the possibility that they were the same person when someone called his name from what sounded like a great distance.

  He turned and found himself in the charnel house.

  “Come on,” Tash told him.

  She appeared from the gloom.

  “Come on, Charlie, we’ve found a way out.”

  She ran into the darkness, and he followed her without asking where she was going, trusting her completely.

  She was the only person on earth now he could believe in. But he knew that wouldn’t protect her. He knew she was in danger. He could do nothing.

  A growing sense of doom spread through him. A seed of something terrible sprouted somewhere deep in his heart. Something terrible that he was born to be, that he would become. Something terrible that would threaten Tash, Jasmine, Roy and everyone on the Barrowmore estate. Something terrible that would blight the whole world.

  Part Six

  DESCENDED TO HELL

  Chapter 86

  GRIM WEATHER FOR GRIM TIMES

  WHITECHAPEL—3:38 PM, FEBRUARY 28, 2011

  When the police finally raided Spencer Drake’s squat, they found PC David Rees nailed to the wall. He was dead.

  Soon, the whole estate knew about it. Although some residents would probably say it was one less filth on the streets, it did ramp up fear levels. Mysterious deaths did that, especially violent ones. And the violence wreaked on Barrowmore over the past few days had been extreme.

  Over the years, there had been shootings, there had been knifings. That was bad enough for most people. But a couple of bullets to the head or a shiv to the guts was really nothing to compare with the mutilations and public displays of cruelty witnessed since Friday’s killings in the lock-up.

  Rumors of torture and abuse had often buzzed through the estate over the years. Quite a few residents had been involved in crime at some level—drug dealing, money laundering, or loan sharking. And when one of them disappeared, speculation grew about whom they’d pissed off and what had happened to them.

  But their punishments, if they were punished, were never made into an event.

  Not like these murders.

  It was as if the killer wanted his work to be seen. Well, thought the man they dubbed the New Ripper, the killer had wanted just that.

  The world needed to know what was at work on Barrowmore. It needed to be aware of what was coming. The murders were a warning. The killer was saying, “This is a taste of the future.”

  All will hate. All will kill. All will spread my gospel. And my gospel is death.

  The New Ripper steadied himself, leaning against the wall. He was lurking near the lock ups. Something had brought him here. Something had called him. It was the same voice that had been calling him for days, but it was too far away, too distant. He knew what it was. He knew who it was. But he was vague about what the voice wanted.

/>   The New Ripper had answered similar calls fifteen years before. The voice in his head had been strong.

  I am the lord who gapes . . . I am the lantern of the tomb . . . I am the moth eating at the law . . .

  The voice in his head had said, Prepare the way . . . kill one, kill two, kill three, kill four . . . prepare for the fifth . . . the fifth we share . . . our reign shall begin with her blood . . . .

  The man had listened to the voice. He had taken on the mantle. He was an heir to past atrocities. A prince in the kingdom of pain.

  But now he wanted his throne. He wanted to be king. He was ready, and the voice beckoned him. It summoned him for one last act, an act that would bring hell to earth.

  The meaning of what he did in 1996 was about to become known to him. It had played on his mind for years. It had plagued him mercilessly these past few days. It had got so bad that his work had been affected. But then, he was never that good at his job. He’d winged it throughout his career. He’d got away with—he smiled to himself—murder.

  He leaned against the wall, hands buried in his coat pockets. It was cold and wet. The rain had been relentless over the past few days. Maybe it was a sign. Grim weather for grim times. But let it rain, he thought. Let it rain blood. Let it rain scraps of meat and shards of bone.

  Let the world be saturated in death.

  Let me do what I am meant to do.

  He was itching to kill again. He was desperate to hear the voice guide him. He was bursting to pin another one down and take things from her body.

  He was about to turn and walk away when the door to the lock-up burst open, and a figure carrying a child stumbled out.

  Chapter 87

  THE ONE SHE WAS WAITING FOR

  WHITECHAPEL—9:30 PM, JULY 24, 1996

  She knew someone was coming for her. She felt it. Her mother had warned her, and her grandmother had warned her.

  And her dreams had also warned her. They were relentless. Every night, she would wake up screaming, her body drenched in sweat. Every night the same dream. A figure chasing her in the moonlight, gaining on her, despite the fact that he was walking and she was running. It was like a horror film. The menacing villain stalking the heroine. And no matter how quickly she ran, how far she got away from him, he would always be waiting at the next corner.